All right, so we have a big question here from EA. EA asks, "Is Cal Newport's outlook on the future too positive? Cal often compares social media and digital technology addiction to cigarettes, claiming that it will probably end up with bans and less tolerance as happened with cigarettes. It seems to me that everything is pointing towards the opposite.

Here are six examples that EA gives. One, it is almost impossible to go to a restaurant and not see kids on a phone. Two, schools are becoming lax in their rules. Three, proving that cigarettes are harmful is way easier than proving that social media is harmful. Four, this troubling rush for remote work indicates that people want more digital interactions, not less.

Five, I contend that cigarettes actually prove that people want more addiction as long as it's less visible. And six, something could also be said about energy drinks. I'm not sure if I get point six. So here's what I'd say, EA. You might not be correctly portraying my views on this.

So here are the two claims I actually make, which are similar, but I think they've become twisted a little bit in the way that you're talking about them. So one, when it comes to cigarettes and social media use, the claim I've made is that teenage social media use will be seen in the future like we now see teenage smoking.

So we realized teenagers are particularly vulnerable to the addictive properties of nicotine, so we should find it to be inappropriate for a 16-year-old or a 14-year-old to be smoking cigarettes. Cigarette companies should not advertise towards them. The culture shifted on that. And obviously, some teenagers still smoke. It's not like it once was, where like, look, this is if you're cool is what you're doing, and it was much more prevalent.

So I've made that argument, not that digital use in general, culture-wide, population-wide, is going to go the way of cigarettes, where cigarette usage, after staying stable at about 30% for a long time, has in more recent years been falling. Two, I've been arguing that the age of having a small number of social media platform monopolies that everyone feels cultural pressure to use, universal social media tools, like we were five years ago with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, that that age is going to go away.

And that the tools we use to communicate and to be entertained is going to fragment and become more bespoke. And so you might be using TikTok, and I might be listening to this podcast, and you might be into this streaming service, and I use that streaming service, and you might be on this social network, a platform that's specifically aimed at athletes, and it's going to become much more fragmented and bespoke.

This age of, if you're not on this one or two platforms, it's weird that we look at you with concern in our eyes, that you get the same type of blowback I used to get in 2014 or 2015 or 2016 when I said, I don't use social media, that type of pearl-clutching gasping, what do you mean?

That's all going to go away for a lot of reasons I've talked about before. However, none of this claims that people aren't going to be very distracted looking at screens all the time. I don't know if that's going to change broadly anytime soon. I just think we're not going to have 14-year-olds with unrestricted social media access.

I just think that we're not going to have two companies that everyone has to use their service. And I think that's good, and I think that is optimistic, but I do not have a view that is so optimistic that it says, oh, we're not going to be distracted by the digital in the future.

I don't think that's going to be the case. I think if anything, it might become more distracting, and we have to talk about the metaverse and augmented reality and virtual reality, and it's a whole complicated picture that I can't see clearly through. So I think I'm a lot more narrow in what I claim EA.

So for better or for worse, my optimism is more focused than the brand of optimism that you're pushing back against here. I will say one thing, though. Your point number three, proving that cigarettes are harmful is way easier than proving that social media is harmful. I'm not sure that's true.

And I'll just point you towards a New Yorker piece I wrote in the fall, last fall. I wrote a New Yorker piece that asked the question, should teenagers be using social media? And one of the points I made in there is we often forget how long it took to convince ourselves that smoking was harmful.

And I went back and I found the original articles. I mean, I have scientific articles from early 20th century where people are saying there might be a lung cancer thing going on here. And there was a lot of pushback about it. When did we get to the point where we had a sort of consistent message from, let's say, the surgeon general that smoking caused lung cancer?

You had to get to the '50s or '60s. I mean, it took decades. And I talked about it in that article. So I was looking at the research and I was talking to experts about the social psych research on social media use among adolescents and harmful outcomes. And I was saying, yeah, it's a messy literature.

These literatures are messy. And even when it says clear cut as smoking and lung cancer, it wasn't clear cut. And it took decades to really be confident about it. So my point there was don't expect the quote unquote "science" to come in and have a clear answer. We couldn't do it for smoking.

It's going to take a long time to get an answer like that for social media. So we have to move beyond the science and depend more on our own experience, the testimony of the people using these tools, our own instincts as parents and educators that this is a cultural problem, not one that we can look to the science to solve.

So, you know, it's interesting aside, it took a long time to figure out that smoking really was harmful.